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As Chief Marketing Officer of Viant, a Time Inc. company, Jon is responsible for leading brand and product marketing, communications, research, creative services as well as new business development and strategic partnerships. He is a recognized industry thought-leader in automotive, digital marketing, CRM, and data-driven targeting and measurement.

Jon joined Viant in 2008 as Senior Vice President, Global Category Development, and was responsible for growing revenue in the automotive category by over 40 percent in his first year. During a period of rapid growth and multiple acquisitions, he led business development and strategic partnerships across the enterprise on a global basis.

Prior to joining Viant, Jon spent 12 years in the Marketing Leadership Program at Ford Motor Company. As head of Digital Marketing and CRM, Jon was a catalyst in the digitally-driven transition of U.S. brand marketing and advertising at Ford.

Jon is a regular speaker and panelist at ad tech industry events and a guest lecturer at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. Jon has an MBA in Marketing from Indiana University and a BS in Management Information Systems from Central Michigan University.

B2B marketers have more advantages than ever to increase the precision and accuracy of their campaigns. And to reach and engage the right qualified leads, multi-touch attribution (MTA) is one of the best tools to help B2B marketers have greater precision and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns throughout the customer journey, writes, Jon Schulz, CMO, Viant.

AN UNMISSABLE GUIDE TO CHOOSING THE RIGHT KAM ENABLEMENT PARTNER

Key Accounts are complex, global behemoths. The old ways of managing them just won’t do.

Effective B2B marketing is about reaching the right people with the greatest influence on a company’s purchase decision-making process. Because the B2B industry is guided by a relationship-based selling process, and not quick sales or impulse buys, the purchase cycle is longer and it can be a challenge to acquire new prospects and create meaningful engagement.

Since a lead may be downloading white papers, visiting a website or interacting with a targeted ad, B2B marketing is an ideal candidate for advanced multi-touch attribution (MTA). MTA allows marketers to look at different channels across the path to purchase to see what has the biggest impact. And with so many touchpoints required for a B2B sale, MTA techniques provide data-driven marketers with the kind of rich insights that reduce wasted ad spend and make the complex customer journey easier to navigate.

Here’s a look at a few key benefits MTA can bring to B2B marketing efforts:

Touchpoints and Reaching Decision Makers

B2B purchase decisions are inherently complicated because they require the buy-in of multiple decision makers. Within the B2B space, the number of stakeholders involved in a purchase decision grew from 5.4 in 2015 to 6.8 in 2017, according to Harvard Business Review. B2B marketers must remember it’s not one needle in the haystack or just one person they’re looking to reach, but the particular chain of people that can impact the decision: the circle of influence.

Taking a step back, part of the challenge of attribution lies in the proliferation of internet devices in recent years. The number of connected devices and connections per person is projected to increase to 13 by 2021, up from just 8 in 2016. As a result, B2B marketers struggle to determine the impact of their campaigns against the growing circle of influence with which they need to engage.

A multi-touch model empowers B2B marketers by incorporating a mix of channels, campaigns and metrics, eliminating the blind spots that arise with a last-touch or first-touch attribution model.

Success with Sequential Messaging

Marketing materials and advertising creative should be developed with the purchase funnel in mind. When it comes to B2B marketing, a sequenced and seamless conversation with prospects across channels and devices results in higher conversions.

Let’s say a prospect is reading a publication with a targeted video ad about retail technology. The next time the prospect visits the publication, they are presented with a call-to-action to download a white paper and the following day they watch a video ad on their mobile device featuring a customer success story. This prospect has been successfully targeted on multiple devices, ideally resulting in conversion. Throughout the customer journey, MTA informs which channel, which creative and what order led to the highest rate of conversion.

How a Persistent Identifier Improves Lead Generation

There was a time when old-school tactics like direct mail and telemarketing were the savviest approaches to reaching a prospect. But physical mailers and cold calling have become largely inefficient and dated methods of interaction. Additionally, they can be costly and may require outsourcing lead generation efforts to a third party. Most importantly, they tend to fail when it comes to the personalized approach people now demand.

Successful B2B marketers combine CRM data with identity-based marketing to build a consistent and persistent identifier that ensures far greater accuracy in B2B marketing campaigns. A persistent identifier gives marketers vital information to determine if they are targeting the right person, their seniority level and even what technology they currently use.

Deterministic capabilities enable B2B marketers to activate rich data such as SIC codes, company addresses,partner companies and decision-maker profiles, and reach out to specific device IDs to personalize the message to the right person. However, just because a company can reach out doesn’t mean they are guaranteed to secure a meeting with a prospect. Remember to consider frequency capping in B2B marketing and not over-message the best customers and prospects.